


conjure up guilty reminders

by winchilsea



Category: Young Justice
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-07
Updated: 2013-07-07
Packaged: 2017-12-17 22:57:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/872921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchilsea/pseuds/winchilsea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are Roy Harper. Or, alternatively, you aren't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	conjure up guilty reminders

**Author's Note:**

> for the young justice ficathon prompt: [roy harper; a character study](http://kidiots.livejournal.com/23198.html?thread=320158#t320158)

It is strange, how quickly the anger and scorn fades, as if in bringing him back you are free of all your wrongs and demons, as if you were merely keeping them safe for him. There's a lightness to you now—not easy but certainly earned, you believe. Whoever you used to be, it wasn't _you_ —it was always him or, alternatively, the Light's programming. What you own is five years worth of fuck ups, where anger made way for desperation only to rise back full force as bile to spit in the faces of others.

You are Roy Harper.

Or, alternatively, you aren't.

_He's_ Roy Harper, and haven't you absolved yourself by bringing him back? Except there are eight years of his life that you've stolen, and you think if it were you in his place and him in yours, you'd be more resigned to it. But that's the eight years you spent living and learning speaking, not the fifteen years you two share.

But that's okay. This is your life now. It has to be. Your wife and your child—they aren't his. And you can't think about it for too long, wondering _what if_ you'd never been created, _what if_ she'd fallen in love with the original Roy Harper, _what if_ this, too, is something that you've stolen.

You learn to start regretting more than that one disastrous night where your entire world got redefined for you—except every regret branches off it. You regret the years you spent pushing needles under your skin to find escape, regret crawling into bottles to find comfort, regret pushing your friends away. Your friends whom you think you just might never see again.

It's true enough. _Wally's dead._ He died saving the world and you're just a little bit proud, aren't you? Or is that Cadmus brainwashing still knocking around in your head. (The truth is, you're more sad than proud but it's wrong of you to be less than proud of what he's done.)

Maybe you can offer some comfort to Dick and Kaldur, the three of you mourning the lost corner in your friendship, but five years ago you excised yourself from them neatly enough that you don't think you have the right anymore. They closed ranks, stitched themselves up from where you left them open and gaping. And isn't it a bitter thought, to think that you can slot back in now that there's an opening?

In the end, you've made peace, a little, with the all the pieces fighting inside of you. You're doing it the same way you've done everything: running and shouldering everything alone because the others, they'll just never understand. The lone wolf mentality. It's been bred in all bones of superheroes and misfits like you, but you have five bitter years of proof that it works.

Or, alternatively, doesn't work. Because there's _her_ , whom you married, who came back for you and glued your warring pieces together in that caustic way of hers.

She's quiet now, busy comforting her sister, and you don't blame her. Artemis lost more than you did, and you can't be the star of every tragedy. So breathe, find your anchor. One day, you think you'll be able to look Roy Harper in the face without hiding behind your tried and true methods of deflection; one day, you'll believe all these things you tell yourself; one day, you'll have really moved on.

The bundle in your arms coo and you think that _one day_ won't be so far away.


End file.
